As yet another finals week is at last on the horizon, I'm hit once again with the most shocking of realizations: I may not have done all of my assigned readings this semester. I suppose that this has become somewhat of a ritual end-of-the-semester admission. But though I am at fault for not printing all of the hundreds of pages from LATTE that I ideally should have, after a few semesters at this university it has become clear to me that the University, as well, is at fault for my repeated failures to complete my readings.

There are essentially four types of readings that instructors hand out to students: Books, course packets, in-class handouts and LATTE postings.

The three earlier methods share a common trait that makes them highly conducive to students reading them-they're all tangible from the get-go.

In those situations, you can hold the reading in your hand, easily flip back and forth between pages and mark up whatever you want with your pen from the very beginning.

However, for a LATTE reading, those things are simply not true. With an online posting, access to the reading is immediately greatly limited.

Even if you have a tablet laptop, taking notes on and highlighting sections of readings on your computer screen is a tremendous hassle. Going back to previous sections by scrolling through often temperamental programs is also no simple feat.

Worst of all, reading lengthy assignments on a computer screen can be a literally painful task. Some readings, though often too few, can be read in a normative format that is easy to your eyes, much like a word processing document. But far too many readings posted online are copied pages from books or odd-font PDFs, which physically strain your eyes if you try and read them online.

Lately, medical research has pointed to a new category of disorders under the title of "computer vision syndrome." The syndrome encompasses various types of eye problems that arise in people who spend lengthy periods of time staring at computer screens.

College usage of computers is obviously high to begin with. There's no need to expand the potential danger to our eyes by reading hundreds of pages online each week.

Now obviously there's something seemingly simple that any given student could do to alleviate this issue-just print the reading. And when it comes down to paper-writing time and you need to use the readings to write something coherent, that's exactly what many students do.

But we shouldn't be forced to stock our rooms with printer cartridges or make daily trips to the Intercultural Center to use our 20 free pages a day, which over the course of four days could help crank out that 80-page reading. Quite frankly, it's an annoying burden upon students to get everything printed.

What I propose the University do to mend this widespread issue is simply turn the burden on its head and require instructors to offer course packets that include any and all material posted on LATTE.

Students such as myself who would rather pay 20-something dollars for a preprinted course packet and have all readings at their disposal for the entire semester should be allowed to do so.

If most students are going to have to print pages at some point anyhow, then it's not as if we were ever "going green" by using LATTE.

LATTE became a case of instructors using the Internet, perhaps unintentionally, as a somewhat of a cop-out for preparing a course packet, which requires a significant amount of preparation to produce.

The abundance of LATTE-dependant courses is far from being the reason that students fail to complete all their course readings.

And requiring course packets for each course isn't a panacea to student apathy with regard to required readings.

It's a courtesy that the University should offer its students across the board, one that would make our lives just a little bit easier.